I'm not sure what I'd been expecting as a dropoff point, but this wasn't it.
"You've got a family?" I asked.
Dwight scowled. "You don't need to come in."
Then he opened the truck door and fell into the driveway.
I got out my side and came around to help.
Dwight was cursing the pavement.
"Should've warned you about that first step," I apologized.
"I'm fine," he snapped.
He pushed my hand away, stumbled to his feet. I followed him to the front door.
I heard children before we even got to the porch. A girl and a boy were yelling. Feet stomped. Porcelain crashed and a woman's limp voice escalated over the noise: "No, no, no."
Dwight turned toward me. "I'm okay now."
Then the door opened and a grinning Latino boy about eight said, "Mr. Hayes, tell her to stop hitting me!"
A younger AfricanAmerican girl pounced on the boy in a flurry of small fists. Both children yelled, did a oneeighty, and raced up the green shagcarpeted stairwell that faced the front door. Their thumping feet on the poorly constructed steps sounded like mallets on a cardboard box.
Dwight took a deep breath. Then he plunged into the house like he was entering the first circle of hell. He followed the children up the stairs.
"Dwight?" a woman's voice called after him. "Are you hurt, son?"
Dwight got to the top and turned the corner. He yelled, "Get the hell out!"
The Latino boy and his nemesis, the little girl, came rushing down the stairs, grinning, and disappeared into a room on the right.
The woman's voice said, "Chris, Amanda, no, no, no."
Despite everything I'd ever been warned about highrisk entries, I stepped inside.
The place smelled of longago meals—fried chicken, oranges, grilled cheese sandwiches. A wall unit AC was humming and whining somewhere in back, but it made no difference. The house was hotter than the summer night outside.
To the left was a den, illuminated only by a television. Half a dozen schoolaged children reclined on sofas, eating Cheetos and watching The Magic School Bus.
To the right, where Chris and Amanda had run, a woman dominated a blue couch in the living room. A portrait of Jesus hung on the wall above her. At her feet, two toddlers sat Vlegged on the carpet amidst a Gettysburg of Legos and blocks. The last child—not counting however many might be packed into the closets—was an Anglo boy of about ten. He stood next to the woman, fanning her face with a piece of cardboard.
The woman smiled pleasantly at me. "I'm Mrs. Hayes. Are you Dwight's friend?"
She looked in her late fifties, paleskinned, not merely fat but big in every respect, from wrists to ankles to fingers. She wore a pink tentdress and gaudy makeup that struggled to create contours on her otherwise shapeless face. Her hair was the colour of diet cola, and looked like it had been cut and combed by a barber who usually did men.
I introduced myself, told her I'd given Dwight a ride after he'd had a minor accident at Scholz Garten.
Her pleasant smile didn't change. "Is my boy all right?"
"Yes, ma'am. Just a little scraped up. Dwight'll be fine."
She nodded contentedly.
I couldn't help thinking about a white lab mouse I'd once seen at A&M—a psychology maze graduate who'd figured out how to push the reward button. The mouse was allowed to sit there all day long, punching, gorging, punching, gorging, until it became an enormous, fuzzy mound of rodent complacency, its pink eyes glazed and disconnected with the world beyond that quarterinchdiameter red circle which gave him bliss.
Mrs. Hayes looked like a woman who had found the reward button.
Chris and Amanda did another lap through the living room.
Mrs. Hayes called after them halfheartedly, "Chris!"
The boy leapt over a toddler thumping blocks on the floor, knocked down a vase, kept running with the girl close behind. Mrs. Hayes blinked, mildly annoyed, like the food button was stuck.
"Chris!" she called again.
The next lap through the living room, Chris stopped. The girl ran into him. She pummeled his back while he waited for instructions.
"Chris," Mrs. Hayes said pleasantly, "what video will keep the children quiet for a while?"
"Star Wars!" he shouted.
"Austin Powers!" protested the girl, whapping him.
The two of them started arguing. Mrs. Hayes looked ever so slightly pained. "I don't approve of those choices, but I must have it quiet for a while. I'm getting my headache again."
Chris widened his eyes, as if Mrs. Hayes' headache was a thing to be avoided.
"We'll figure it out, Mrs. H.," he promised.
Chris and Amanda herded the two littler children out of the room, leaving us only the boy with the cardboard fan. Soon the sounds of screaming and chasing were replaced by roaring ships and blasting lasers.
I sat in the chair by the window. Mrs. Hayes smiled at me from her couch, the boy with the cardboard making her hair flicker with every sweep. My scalp started to itch from the heat. I wondered how much the kid charged.
"Well," Mrs. Hayes said, starting over. "You work for Matthew's company?"
She said Matthew with lazy familiarity—two warm, fluffy syllables.
"No, ma'am," I said. "You know Mr. Pena?"
"Oh, goodness, yes. Matthew's been wonderful to my Dwight. They went to college together, you know. Would you like some iced tea?"
"Don't go to any trouble, ma'am."
"No, it's no trouble." She waved toward the kitchen. "I believe I'd like some, too."
We sat there beaming at each other for a few seconds before I realized I'd received my marching orders.
The kitchen was all Formica and particleboard, the woodgrain veneer peeling away from the cabinets in large strips. The sink was piled with dishes. A Cheerios box was overturned on the counter.
It took me a minute to find two clean glasses, then to find a pitcher in the refrigerator that held anything resembling iced tea. I opened the freezer for ice. On the bottom, swirling in mist, were little strips of notebook paper, each one with a name in cursive: Marcy, Deborah, Chris, Amanda, John, Clement. There were others in the back, stuck there so long they were grafted to the frost. I scraped away one. It said "Dwight."
The kids in the den kept eating Cheetos, happily watching space ships detonate on TV. I filled two glasses and brought my spoils back into the living room.
I gave one glass to Mrs. Hayes, then sat across from her on a wicker rocker.
The kid with the fan said, "Are you cool enough yet, Mrs. H.?"
"You keep going, Clem."
The boy switched the cardboard to his other hand.
Mrs. Hayes smiled at me. "Clem stole money from my wallet last week. Now he's paying me back."
"Really."
"They all try it when they first come here. 'Do not despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry.' "
Clem kept fanning her, his face weary and bitter.
"Proverbs," I said.
Mrs. Hayes beamed approval. "Yes, dear. Very good."
"Clem's name is in the freezer."
"Oh, they're all in the freezer. All the ones I pray for. Children are forced to grow up too fast, nowadays. Don't you think?"
I sipped some tea. It had absorbed a residual taste of something else from the refrigerator—ham or bologna, something decidedly non kosher. I sat my glass on the end table. "These are . . . neighbourhood children you take care of?"
"Mostly," Mrs. Hayes said. "Their parents work late and can't afford child care. This is my ministry to them. The house was so lonely after Dwight graduated. That's what started me taking in children. It was good of Matthew to arrange for Dwight to stay here."
"Matthew did that?"
More smiling. The reward button was working fine, now.
"He called me even before he'd arranged it with Dwight. Said it seemed a shame, getting an expensive hotel room or an apartment, when Dwight could spend a few months here with me. Especially after all those years in California. Naturally, I agreed."
"Naturally. And when Dwight didn't want to impose?"
"Oh, Matthew insisted. Such a polite young man."
Above Mrs. Hayes' head, the framed portrait of Jesus had his hands clasped, his eyes heavenward. If I stayed with Mrs. Hayes all day, I imagined I'd look like that, too.
I thought about Dwight upstairs, probably in his boyhood room, Matthew Pena having a good laugh about it every night when he went to sleep in his luxury hotel. I wondered if Dwight had his head buried under a pillow right now.
"It isn't Dwight's fault," Mrs. Hayes mused. "I don't expect him to do as well as Matthew has done, but I do tell him to pay attention, learn from Matthew. Matthew is so good at what he does."
"Yes, ma'am," I agreed. "Very good."
There was a crash in the den. A boy said something too soft to interpret? a girl giggled.
Mrs. Hayes took a deep breath. "No, no, no!"
When the giggling didn't stop, Mrs. Hayes seemed to sniff the air for a scent, then called, "Marcy and John. I know that was you. You come in here this minute."
Another crash.
Mrs. Hayes sighed. Clem the fan boy started to smile, but quickly stifled it when he caught me looking at him. I gave him a wink.
"I should go," I said. "Thanks for your hospitality, ma'am."
"I'll keep you in my prayers, Tres." And then she gave me her empty bolognaflavoured tea glass to take to the kitchen on my way out.
As I left, Mrs. Hayes was still calling from her couch for the children to behave. Clem was fanning her hair into a cowlick with his piece of cardboard.
I stepped out into the cooler summer night and said a silent prayer to Our Saviour of the Sofa Painting that my name would not be going into Mrs. Hayes' freezer.
CHAPTER 14
"Now tell me this wasn't worth it."
Ruby McBride set Garrett's folded wheelchair on the deck and waved her hand toward the horizon.
Garrett unclamped his arms from around my neck, transferring himself to the bench that ran around the railing. I tried not to wheeze too hard. Nothing like carrying your brother up three flights of stairs to burst your illusions of being in good shape.
Ruby's houseinprogress was a square tower, built on the slope of a hill overlooking Point Lone Star—a roughly triangular piece of land that jutted into Lake Travis.
The business part of her property was at the shoreline, about a hundred yards downhill—a wellilluminated marina, a small floating restaurant, a drivedown boat launch. She even had a warehouse for drystacking and a giant forklift with padded teeth for retrieving the boats. A glowing pier stuck into the water and Yed about ten yards out, making two rows of wet slips for yachts. There were maybe a dozen boats docked—from twentyfooters all the way up to sixtyfooters.
The lake was scored with moonlight. Lights from other palatial homes sprinkled the hills on the far shore. The Milky Way shimmered above us.
All in all, not a bad view.
"The plumbing works," Ruby announced. She waved toward a sliding glass door that led into an unfinished kitchen/breakfast area. The room was starkly lit, glowing in the night like an empty fish
tank. "So if you need the john, gentlemen, please don't whiz off my balcony."